notebook.
And it is. My eyes well up with tears.
In the same way that reading the Bible, or listening to radio preachers, would not clue the neophyte in to the very active kindness of a true Christian home, reading the Koran, hearing about “moderate Islam,” tells us nothing about the astonishing core warmth and familial sense of these Arab families.
I think: If everybody in America could see this, our foreign policy would change.
For my part, in the future, when I hear “Arab” or “Arab street” or those who “harbor, shelter, and sponsor” the terrorists, I am going to think of the Arabian Ice City, and that goose, moving among the cold-humbled kids, and the hundreds of videotapes now scattered around Arab homes in Dubai, showing beloved children reaching down to touch Snow.
WHAT IS JED CLAMPETT DOING IN GITMO?
Having a Coke after Arabian Ice City, trying to get my crying situation sorted out, it occurred to me that the American sense of sophistication/irony—our cleverness, our glibness, our rapid-fire delivery, our rejection of gentility, our denial of tradition, our blunt realism—which can be a form of greatness when it manifests in a Gershwin, an Ellington, a Jackson Pollock—also causes us to (wrongly) assume a corresponding level of sophistication/irony/worldliness in the people of other nations.
Example One: I once spent some time with the mujahideen in Peshawar, Pakistan—the men who were at that time fighting the Russians and formed the core of the Taliban—big, scowling, bearded men who’d just walked across the Khyber Pass for a few weeks of rest. And the biggest, fiercest one of all asked me, in complete sincerity, to please convey a message to President Reagan, from him, and was kind of flabbergasted that I didn’t know the president and couldn’t just call him up for a chat, man-to-man.
Example Two: On the flight over to Dubai, the flight attendant announces that if we’d like to make a contribution to the Emirates Airline Foundation children’s fund, we should do so in the provided envelope. The sickly Arab man next to me, whose teeth are rotten and who has, with some embarrassment, confessed to “a leg problem,” responds by gently stuffing the envelope full of the sugar cookies he was about to eat. Then he pats the envelope, smiles to himself, folds his hands in his lap, goes off to sleep.
What one might be tempted to call simplicity could be more accurately called a limited sphere of experience. We round up “a suspected Taliban member” in Afghanistan and, assuming that Taliban means the same thing to him as it does to us (a mob of intransigent inconvertible Terrorists), whisk this sinister Taliban member—who grew up in, and has never once left, what is essentially the Appalachia of Afghanistan; who possibly joined the Taliban in response to the lawlessness of the post-Russian warlord state, in the name of bringing some order and morality to his life or in a misguided sense of religious fervor—off to Guantánamo, where he’s treated as if he personally planned 9/11. Then this provincial, quite possibly not-guilty, certainly rube-like guy, whose view of the world is more limited than we can even imagine, is denied counsel and a possible release date, and subjected to all of the hardships and deprivations our modern military-prison system can muster. How must this look to him? How must we look to him?
My experience has been that the poor, simple people of the world admire us, are enamored of our boldness, are hopeful that the insanely positive values we espouse can be actualized in the world. They are, in other words, rooting for us. Which means that when we disappoint them—when we come in too big, kill innocents, when our powers of discernment are diminished by our frenzied, self-protective, fearful post-9/11 energy—we have the potential to disappoint them bitterly and drive them away.
LOOK, DREAM, BUT STAY OUT THERE
My fourth and final hotel, the Emirates
And it is. My eyes well up with tears.
In the same way that reading the Bible, or listening to radio preachers, would not clue the neophyte in to the very active kindness of a true Christian home, reading the Koran, hearing about “moderate Islam,” tells us nothing about the astonishing core warmth and familial sense of these Arab families.
I think: If everybody in America could see this, our foreign policy would change.
For my part, in the future, when I hear “Arab” or “Arab street” or those who “harbor, shelter, and sponsor” the terrorists, I am going to think of the Arabian Ice City, and that goose, moving among the cold-humbled kids, and the hundreds of videotapes now scattered around Arab homes in Dubai, showing beloved children reaching down to touch Snow.
WHAT IS JED CLAMPETT DOING IN GITMO?
Having a Coke after Arabian Ice City, trying to get my crying situation sorted out, it occurred to me that the American sense of sophistication/irony—our cleverness, our glibness, our rapid-fire delivery, our rejection of gentility, our denial of tradition, our blunt realism—which can be a form of greatness when it manifests in a Gershwin, an Ellington, a Jackson Pollock—also causes us to (wrongly) assume a corresponding level of sophistication/irony/worldliness in the people of other nations.
Example One: I once spent some time with the mujahideen in Peshawar, Pakistan—the men who were at that time fighting the Russians and formed the core of the Taliban—big, scowling, bearded men who’d just walked across the Khyber Pass for a few weeks of rest. And the biggest, fiercest one of all asked me, in complete sincerity, to please convey a message to President Reagan, from him, and was kind of flabbergasted that I didn’t know the president and couldn’t just call him up for a chat, man-to-man.
Example Two: On the flight over to Dubai, the flight attendant announces that if we’d like to make a contribution to the Emirates Airline Foundation children’s fund, we should do so in the provided envelope. The sickly Arab man next to me, whose teeth are rotten and who has, with some embarrassment, confessed to “a leg problem,” responds by gently stuffing the envelope full of the sugar cookies he was about to eat. Then he pats the envelope, smiles to himself, folds his hands in his lap, goes off to sleep.
What one might be tempted to call simplicity could be more accurately called a limited sphere of experience. We round up “a suspected Taliban member” in Afghanistan and, assuming that Taliban means the same thing to him as it does to us (a mob of intransigent inconvertible Terrorists), whisk this sinister Taliban member—who grew up in, and has never once left, what is essentially the Appalachia of Afghanistan; who possibly joined the Taliban in response to the lawlessness of the post-Russian warlord state, in the name of bringing some order and morality to his life or in a misguided sense of religious fervor—off to Guantánamo, where he’s treated as if he personally planned 9/11. Then this provincial, quite possibly not-guilty, certainly rube-like guy, whose view of the world is more limited than we can even imagine, is denied counsel and a possible release date, and subjected to all of the hardships and deprivations our modern military-prison system can muster. How must this look to him? How must we look to him?
My experience has been that the poor, simple people of the world admire us, are enamored of our boldness, are hopeful that the insanely positive values we espouse can be actualized in the world. They are, in other words, rooting for us. Which means that when we disappoint them—when we come in too big, kill innocents, when our powers of discernment are diminished by our frenzied, self-protective, fearful post-9/11 energy—we have the potential to disappoint them bitterly and drive them away.
LOOK, DREAM, BUT STAY OUT THERE
My fourth and final hotel, the Emirates
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